


Lost in Hope

by StalkiZoa



Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst and Romance, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Multi, Unrequited Crush, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:41:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24522529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StalkiZoa/pseuds/StalkiZoa
Summary: Choi San wasn't lucky when its about love. The first time the petals fell out of his mouth, he was devestated, but that didn't stop him from holding on that feeling. He didn't want to give it up, no matter how hopeless it seemed. Deep inside of him he knew, that he was doing the right thing.Will he follow the path of the surgery, or will he continue to fight for what he loves?I'm very very very very bad at summarys and tags, help. Anyway I want to keep the summary as spoiler free as possible, I hope you're interessted. There is a death of an side character and description of Blood and so one, but there is no real violence so I had no idea if warnings are needed.I just hope I didn't scare you away
Relationships: Choi San/Original Female Character(s), Jeon Soyeon/Kim Hongjoong, Kim Hongjoong/Park Seonghwa
Kudos: 1





	Lost in Hope

The night is a beautiful time. Everything seems to be at peace, while the stars iluminate the streets of the small town with the support of the light of the street lamps. Some are scared of the darkness that comes with it, but if one manages to see the true beauty behind it, a whole different world opens up. Many things happen in the night, perfectly hidden in the shadows. The majority sleeps during this time, but not everyone does. Some people have to go work at night, some simply struggle to fall asleep and some just enjoy the silence that accompanies the dark. Hidden behind the walls of his home, there is also suffering. Sheltered by the sleeping ears around him as well as the protecting darkness. It is not the first time for such a tragedy to occur. It only reminded him of the fact that fate wasn’t on his side. It signalized him in the form of the dark purple petals that constantly fought their way up his throat, ripping the already sensitive flesh open to fall out of his chapped lips, tainted by a small shimmer of blood. For the first few minutes after it started, he couldn’t even cry. The petals kept flowing out of him like a waterfall, crashing onto the heartless bottom of the bucket which he kept with him. The bucket he kept with him because he perfectly knew this was going to happen next night as well. He was only able to start crying when every single little petal that touched his sensitive throat felt like a needle piercing through his flesh. It just hurt. It hurt so much, and he could never tell when it would stop. 

Sometimes he would just sit there for a few minutes, trying to gather those stupid petals in a panic, or hours with just staring and not knowing what to do, as if it would finally stop the next night, but it never did. He felt like he was trapped in an endless loop of suffering, and it felt like his throat was going to burst every time. When it eventually ended, he just fell to his knees in front of the bucket, drained of all his energy. He felt too weak to move, too drained, and all he could do was sit in front of the bucket, staring at the petals of the Aconite on the ground. Slowly, the pain in his throat seemed to leave, as his heart now yelled out in despair. He knew what this meant. He knew what it meant every single night, and still his tears wouldn’t stop falling as he felt that desperate ache longing for comfort. But he didn’t want to be comforted by just anyone. He wanted to be comforted by her. It was ridiculous. He just wanted to hear her say how these petals are false, how they are lying to him, and that he‘s just cruelly being pranked by reality. He wanted to hear her say that she loved him, and that she would take care of him. Even though these petals made him suffer like this, they were wrong and she would help him through the pain. He would take all the pain. He would take all the pain just to hear one of these sentences spoken from her mouth.

In the end he knew that would never happen. He knew he wasn‘t being pranked. This was his reality and he had already fallen to deep. Usually, these petals tell someone that the person they are interested in is not one who is going to feel the same. The petals are supposed to tell the affected person to move on quickly before they fall too deep. He had ignored the signs, and the first time that he noticed the petals, he was devastated. He didn’t want to believe it, it couldn’t be true. So he couldn’t get himself to move on. She was shy, and every time he talked to her, she was barely even able to look at him. He told himself that it was most likely because she actually despised him, but that didn’t stop him from trying to make her like him. It didn’t stop him from trying to make her love him, and at first, it seemed to work. Soon her answers didn’t seem as uncomfortable anymore, and with every passing day she looked at him more often, until he even managed to see her smile and he just felt so happy. He felt like he was finally changing his destiny, just like he always wanted to. She seemed to like him, too, but with every passing night, the petals got more severe. After a month, the petals he threw up started being accompanied by blood, and after half a year now, he just began to start crying as soon as he got home. It just hurt. It hurt so much. He got more quiet and no one ever questioned why, or at least that’s what it seemed like to him. Every word he spoke hurt, and his friends kept asking him why his voice sounded so rough, that it sounded like he had a bad cough. But instead of the truth, he just told them that he got sick. The only thing that helped was medicine he got from the pharmacy. They knew of cases like him, and they also knew that some of these cases never wanted to let go of this feeling. He was one of them. When he kept returning to the pharmacy every week to buy the same kind of medicine, the kind lady behind the counter couldn’t help the pity filling her eyes. She had tried multiple times to convince him to go to therapy, telling him that if his case was this severe then that would be the only way to get rid of it, but he just smiled at her. He just smiled at her with pain in his eyes, and it broke her heart every single time. "Please don’t worry, I can handle it, but have a nice day", and with these words, he left the pharmacy as always. 

He started to take the medicine every day before school in order to be able to talk like he used to, and ever since he started this routine, no one had suspected a thing anymore. Yet it didn’t help him when he got home. As soon as he arrived at his home, his throat would start hurting so much that he just tried to sleep it off in his room. His family was worried, repeatedly asking him what was going on, but he just kept distancing himself from them further, even from his sister, and none of them understood why. He just told them that school was bothersome and tiring, which was the truth, just not in the way he made it sound like. His routine was to get home from school and then going to bed to sleep. He doesn’t even remember the last time he ate a proper meal. His whole diet now consisted of soup as well as any other soft food. He couldn’t get himself to eat properly anymore and he knew he was losing weight, but he couldn‘t see the point anymore.

This had been going on for a year now, and here he was sitting once again, crying because of the petals while leaning over the petals, as if he could try and cry the pain away, just like he did every night. He calmed himself down. He was used to this. So as per usual, he took the bottle and hid it like always. He would throw it into the trash bin two streets away from his home tomorrow so that no one would suspect it’s him to be the one using the bottle‘s contents. That’s how it would always go. Taking his medicine every morning, hiding the dark circles around his eyes with make-up, and walk to school.

But today was different. His usual routine was still the same, but his break was significantly different. He met up with Serin just like he did every day, or more like, he would go to the place she always sat alone at. For a few seconds he was just standing there, looking at her. It felt so unreal how she just sat there doing nothing, and yet it still made his heart beat so fast that he felt like throwing up. He gave himself a few seconds to calm down before he took a seat next to her once again, greeting each other quietly. Usually, Serin would be eating there in peace, but today she just stared at her food for a couple of minutes. Before San was even able to ask if anything was wrong, she spoke up. "Why do you always come over here? Don’t you want to hang out with your friends instead? You used to hang out with Yeosang and Wooyoung a lot, didn’t you?" San blankly stared at her for a few seconds, trying to formulate sentences in his brain that wouldn’t make him sound obvious or desperate. "They‘re too loud", he stated, and Serin looked at him in confusion. He knew he sounded weird, but it was the safest option he could come up with. 

"Don’t get me wrong, I love them, but we always meet up after school, so it's fine. And... Well, you always sit here alone, so I thought maybe you would like to have some company. I don’t know, sitting next to you is just nice. I hope it doesn’t make you uncomfortable". He tried to reason a bit, he knew that his words sounded slightly strange, but it was the only thing he was able to come up with. "No, you don’t make me uncomfortable. Well, honestly, it was really weird at the start, but I got used to your presence.” She smiled, and his heartbeat sped up again. He couldn’t help but stare at that smile. It wasn’t much, it was just a tiny smile, a smile that would appear when she would hear some stupid joke that wasn’t worth the attention. "I agree. It‘s kind of nice to just sit with you. I was just curious", and he couldn’t help but feel his heart beat so harshly. It wasn’t anything special and he knew he shouldn’t be reacting like this, but hearing her say that she liked his company meant so much to him. They usually didn’t speak much. Sometimes he would ask what she ate, or how her day went. Sometimes she would ask why he never had any food with him. She generally asked more about his reason why he did or didn‘t do things. Everything suddenly bottled up so quickly that he didn’t even notice when the oh so familiar feeling in his throat appeared again. When he finally did notice the first few petals climbing up his throat, all he could feel was panic, and he didn’t know what to do. So he just apologized and ran. He covered his mouth and just ran. Wooyoung‘s and Yeosang‘s gazes followed him as well, they noticed something was wrong. 

He didn’t know where to go, so he just ran towards the trees where he knew no one would be. He knew it wasn’t the smartest hiding place he could have come up with, but he had no chance to even get anywhere else as the petals began to rush out of him again. They did so with such an intensity that he thought someone was forcing razor blades down his throat. It had never happened in school before, and he felt the anxiety inside him rising as he began to worry about someone seeing him in this state. That his well hidden secret would be laid out in the open now. He felt his tears crashing down onto the petals on the floor, soon followed by another wave of petals, and he just fell onto his knees, trying to hold himself up. But all the strain on his body caused by his barely existent food intake, the lack of sleep, and his never ending blood loss was just too much for him. His body collapsed before he could even finish getting the rest of the petals out of him. He just laid there, barely hidden behind some trees as if that would be enough to save him. 

Of course he wouldn’t be left there. Serin didn’t know what happened when San suddenly ran away. She just sat there dumbfounded for a few seconds before she got up to run after him. Wooyoung and Yeosang who had also watched the scene unfold had a similar reaction. At first it was as if they froze at the unexpected behaviour displayed by their friend. Only when Serin ran after him, the both of them fell out of their trance and followed her as well. 

When they saw him just lay there, with his head on the ground right next to the bloody petals, they were all just shocked for a couple of seconds. Serin was the first to react, kneeling down next to him to try and wake him up again. Of course all of them knew what the petals meant, but it was their first time to see them covered in blood, or to see someone faint because of them. Yeosang ran off to find a teacher to help, while Wooyoung sat next to Serin trying to find a way help somehow, but none of them knew what to do.

Everything after that happened very quickly. The teacher called an ambulance which would end up taking him to the hospital. A teacher accompanied him, informing his parents of the incident and waiting in the hospital until they arrived. The three followed the school counsellor, who ended up asking them if they wanted to go home after having experienced such a big shock. All of them took him up on his offer, but they also wanted to visit San right away. The school counsellor told them that for now only family members would be allowed to visit him, and the hospital would inform the school as soon as others are allowed to visit, so the counsellor promised to inform them as soon as they would be allowed to visit him as well. 

With that, they were sent home. All of them were confused, it all still seemed like a bad dream, even though it happened right in front of their eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading the story, I would love to hear what you thought. I hope you enjoyed reading.


End file.
